For post-secondary schools, the coronavirus pandemic has spurred a paradigm shift in teaching and learning, as courses have migrated online. Because of this, universities now have the chance to save students huge sums of money by ramping up the creation and use of open educational resources (OER), particularly open textbooks.

A sober look at the trajectory of the pandemic reveals that the prospects of in-person classes resuming as normal this fall are slim to none. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that living with COVID-19 is “the new normal” until a vaccine is found, which experts widely predict will take at least another year, if not more. The high probability of second and third waves of COVID-19 will likely prompt more intermittent lockdowns in the future, as is currently happening in Singapore, one of the countries that initially seemed to be very successful in its coronavirus response. Through this lens, widespread online learning must be seen as part of a new era of post-secondary education, not a short-term fix.

Post-secondary students are among the millions of Canadians watching helplessly as their incomes and savings evaporate. The retail and service jobs that students rely upon will continue to be nonexistent, so long as so much consumer activity sits in suspended animation. Taking on even more student debt will be a bitter pill to swallow, even when factoring in the emergency support benefits that have been promised by Ottawa.

A university student does his coursework online during the coronavirus pandemic.Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AFP

Long story short, any current or aspiring post-secondary student looking to go to college or university anytime soon will likely end up doing so largely online and will be further financially stressed because of it. The prime benefit of adopting OER — which is defined as digital learning materials offered for free through Creative Commons licenses — is that it greatly reduces the cost of receiving a post-secondary education. The average student in Canada taking a full course load will spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a year on textbooks. That is on top of tuition, which is also on the rise.

The most significant cost is for textbooks for year-long introductory courses in major subjects — think chemistry, psychology, accounting, biology, sociology, engineering, physics and others. However, the core concepts students need in order to gain a grounding in these disciplines remains relatively static year-to-year, and high-quality, peer-reviewed open textbooks for these courses already exist for free in digital form as downloadable PDFs. And online classes necessitate that any learning material be provided digitally, anyway.

Another benefit of OER is that professors are able to personalize the learning experience for their students, thanks to their open licenses, by editing them to meet the local or regional context and the practical demands of students’ desired field of work.

Professors interact with their students over videoconference during the COVID-19 pandemic.Nathan Frandino/Reuters

Provincial governments do not have to reinvent the wheel or break the bank to provide post-secondary students with significant savings. Government-funded non-profit organizations under the purview of provincial education ministries already exist in British Columbia, Ontario and Manitoba. These organizations run open education initiatives that help post-secondary institutions in their provinces promote, develop and maintain OER catalogues.

Once they are implemented, the savings for students accrue quickly. Since being established, BCCampus has saved students in that province $14 million on learning materials, eCampus Ontario over $10 million and Campus Manitoba over $1 million, with hundreds of thousands of students benefiting overall. In Saskatchewan, an annual government investment of $250,000 into OER at its post-secondary institutions since 2015 has generated $6.4 million in student savings — a 400 per cent return on investment. University librarians are also already on board, with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries having struck a working group to examine ways to improve their ability to house and disseminate OER.

As we look ahead at the prospect of living in a post-pandemic world that has changed in many ways, a more highly educated, less indebted labour force will help accelerate that adjustment. To prepare, now is the time to scale up the creation and use of free digital textbooks for post-secondary students, in order to adjust higher education to our new COVID-19 reality.

National Post

Kyle Hiebert is the strategy and research advisor for the University of Manitoba Students’ Union and a former editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.

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